Well, I'm not a mathematician either, but human beings consume about 25 billion pounds of food per day, and pump about the same weight of oil. I have no idea what fraction of the energy content the human metabolism extracts from food by weight, but I assume it isn't fantastically efficient. Add the remainder (sewage) to the amount of food that goes uneaten and is otherwise wasted or discarded (like turkey guts), and add to that the amount of garbage that _already_ exists in the world (trillions of pounds), and I still remain skeptical about the lack of sufficient feedstocks preventing this technology from being viable.
I've seen other arguments about efficiency, scalability, cost effectiveness, and so on. While I'm ill-equipped to judge those, the numbers in those arguments at least make sense to me. The insufficient feedstock argument just doesn't seem to add up.
I may not be a climatologist or chemist, but it seems as though the term recycling is justified if you're taking a substance like plastic or organic waste (proteins, fats, carbohydrates) and turning them into simple hydrocarbons; then burn the hydrocarbons; then the C02 and H20 produced go into the atmosphere where they are re-used by plants, which are then re-eaten by animals, and then the cycle RE-starts. I can't think of any word for it other than recycling.
As for the feedstocks, this is from Discover Magazine's article about the technology: from 100lbs of
Medical Waste: 65 lbs oil, 10 lbs gas, 5 lbs carbon and mineral solids, 20 lbs water.
Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem like a 'relative lack of feedstocks' that 'only works for biological fats and some plastics.' Given the scale of garbage, sewage, and agricultural waste produced worldwide (think India and China, not just the USA), I suspect the statement that this 'will never be a large scale replacement for oil' is rash and unqualified.
What about the anything-into-oil technologies (Thermal Conversion) being developed by companies like http://www.changingworldtech.com/? This technology is essentially hydrocarbon recycling. If we start making oil from sewage, garbage, platic bags and old tires and stop pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground, we can clean up the planet and close the currently-open carbon cycle. With recycling in a closed system, as in nature, global warming and certain other environmental impacts cease to be an issue.
With such technology in place, demonization of petroleum would then be less justified. The efficiency of hybrid vehicles would obviously still be relevent, but the issue would cease to be environmental and become purely economical.
With current technology it's hard to beat the convenience of liquid fuel. Hydrocarbdon recycling technology would not require such a dramatic change of infrastructure as electric or hydrogen power - that in itself would have enormous economic and associated environmental benefits. It would also present a parallel avenue of development for existing oil companies, creating incentive for them to actually support an environmentally friendly technology rather than to thwart it.
This is very relevent to those of us living in California, for example, where the government is spending billions in an initiative to roll out a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure. That is CRAZY in light of Thermal Conversion technology.
It seems like motors, solar panels and stabilizers are always the thing that fail on spacecraft. Seriously, it's the sort plot device Star Trek episodes are criticized for - "Captain, the left stabilizer is failing - I can't balance the phase inducers!"
Is there some reason why we can't make these things tougher or more redundant?
Could parallel research and development will enable recognition of audio 'objects' as well? It might help open the stubborn door to voice recognition.
In the short term, I suspect there would be more immediate applications for voice recognition than for visual object recognition, though I am still pulling for these guys if it leads to cars driving themselves.
Anthropomorphizing God with human traits like 'which game would be more fun for Him' is asinine. To make that the centerpoint of your argument is positively ridiculous. When pressed, religious idiots can't even give God a meaningful definition, demonstrating that they don't have any idea what they're talking about to begin with (that was the second day of Intro to Philosophy as I recall).
Well done, by the way, for seeing through my hopelessly transparent plan to create an Orwellian world of thought control... While I'm sure your intention was not to be funny, your reference to Thought Police made me laugh out loud. Who, I wonder, is the original Thought Policeman? It wouldn't happen to be God, would it? Perhaps you've never heard of the Spanish Inquisition, mmm? Or maybe the irony that a born-again president is the one who pushed the PATRIOT act through is lost on you? (You know, the one that tramples all of our privacy rights, rights to trial by jury, let's the government search our houses and record our conversations without ever even telling us, and so on...)
What morons like yourself fail to grasp is that religious dogma IS thought control, and God is the ultimate Big Brother. Only science has the self-critical, self-correcting mechanism required to allow truly free thought and inquiry. And "the truth will set you free," right? Or haven't you read John 8:32?
A central function of religion is indoctrination. The fact is, you and virtually all other religious people simply believe what you believe because you were brainwashed into it as a child. If you had never heard of religion prior to this morning, would you find Christianity compelling? More compelling than Bhuddism or Shintoism? More compelling than Scientology? Only one of them can be right, after all. So which one is it? Oh I see, it just magically happens to be the one you believe in. Why is that, I wonder?
And you presume to lecture me about Thought Police.
Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, drought, famine, small pox, polio, malaria, anthrax, ebola, bird flu, tuberculosis, plague, AIDS, nipples on men, pelvis in whales and snakes, wings on ostriches, alergies, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, leukemia, cancer, MS, Alzheimers, Down Syndrome, Turner Sydnrome, autism... oh, and don't forget terrorism and myopia.
You call any of that crap 'Intelligent Design'? God can't figure out how to create a world without disaster or disease? That is the kind of 'intelligent' design you get from American car companies, not an omnipotent and omniscient being.
Ridiculous.
The real problem highlighted by the ID controversy is that the scientific community are cowards who are unwilling to asert and defend their true convictions about religion. The truth is that the vast majority of scientists think that, as all evidence points to, organized religion is a bunch of nonsense, God is unnecessary and unknowable and therefore irrelevent, Heaven and Hell are a child's fantasy, and believing in any of it is at best a waste of time and resources and (more often) the engine behind the most destructive force on our planet. But scientists are so fearful that most mutter some politically correct lip service whenever questioned or pressed on the issue.
Allowing religion to pursist in the face of humanity's accumulated scientific knowledge is profoundly irresponsible. The whole 'not in my back yard' attitude is astonishingly shortsighted. Religion and our lack of action to irradicate it is extremely dangerous and has deleterious consequences for everyone every single day - don't just think terrorists bombing things, think about actual adults trying to get evolution out of the classrooms - those classrooms are full of 15-year-olds having kids that end up on the street because they don't have knowledge of or access to contraceptives and abortion (ref. Ohio's Timken High School, for example, here _15_percent_ of the female student population is pregnant.) That problem, among many others, is not in your backyard - it is right in your face.
So I volunteer to be the dissenting voice in the crowd - here's my rhetorical rant on behalf of those scientists unable or unwilling to speak their minds, in case anyone is interested:
Religion serves only one purpose: to massage the fragile human ego.
The VAST majority of people who are religious simply believe in what they are born into, whether it is Christianity, Shintoism or Scientology. They believe in order to conform, in order to gain social acceptance, and in order to ease their fears of powerlessness and mortality so they can sleep comfortably at night thinking there is a special plan just for them and eternal life in paradise waiting for them when they die.
The truth about reality and the universe we live in is much more awesome, much more terrifying: we are no more significant than any other living thing on earth. Do you think bacteria go to heaven? You are simply a massive colony of symbiotic bacteria. So is your dog, the rat under the floorboards, and the cockroach out in the garbage.
Cheap parlor tricks like walking on water and burning bushes may seem like miracles to ignorant fools and to the people who lived centuries ago, but the real miracle is that we are alive at all, that in all the cosmos we are fortunate enough to exist in this tiny particular place at this particular time. The real miracle is the awesome power of evolution to explain virtually everything about life: how we descended not just from apes but from reptiles, fish, worms, and bacteria; why we have the physical form we have; why we think and feel and behave the way we do. The real miracle is that our universe is so old and so large that the ignorant peasants who wrote the Bible didn't have words for numbers big enough to describe the truth. The real miracle is that the universe IS knowable, and that miracle is called science. Science gave us dentistry a
Yeah, you're right, I made it all up. The stuff about the article I read about NASA's reusables policy, the Migs, everything. Right before I ran out the door to start my new career designing spacecraft.
I especially like this comment, "what the heck do you think you're doing, arguing for more redundancy in the same breath that you argue for accepting failures if it means making the mission cheaper?"
Last time I checked, the entire purpose of redundancy is to create fault tolerance, so that when you do have failures they are catastrophic ones. The idea being - putting your best thinking cap on here - that small failures are less expensive than catastrophic ones.
You know, that extremely advanced concept of how having 'all your eggs in one basket' can cost you dearly...
Tell you what, next time I head 600km into the Empty Quarter to a dig site you can tag along in a little hybrid SUV with cruise control and cup warmers. I'll go with my team in our four land rovers and pay a bit extra for gas. Take lots of extra water so you can survive long enough for us to pick you up on our way back, and be sure to burn your tires so we can find where you broke down.
I was thrilled to read the space news and finally see NASA admitting that reusables is the wrong approach to getting into space. The idea that you save money by reusing your spacecraft has been demonstrated to be false quite conclusively by the shuttle program. The talk of the complexity of future moon and Mars missions is often based on the presumption that the spacecraft must be ultra-efficient, and are therefore ultra-fragile.
In my view, NASA needs to stop thinking as though every mission, manned or not, is a camping trip where every ounce in your pack is critical. One reason why so many Mars probes have failed is because spacecraft are simply not at all robust. The best illustration I can think of for this mentality, and its counterpart, are US and soviet fighter planes.
Most of the US fighters we're familiar with - F-14s, 15s, 16s, 18s were designed with an extremely high maintenance profile in mind, and their designs assume base conditions that are close to sterile, just like NASA. So, for example, an American fighter can't take off of a runway that hasn't been swept! A stray nail on the runway, and your $20 million dollar plane is history. Obviously this assumes that you'll always be able to sweep your runways.
Now contrast that to Migs from the soviet era. With heavily overbuilt and ultra-durable systems - everything from airframe to electronics to engines - Migs can be maintained at a fraction of the cost, run on crappy fuel, and beaten to shit and back and still keep flying. In one Mig (can't remember which) the front air intakes close on takeoff and dorsal vents are used instead so that in real wartime conditions they could take off and land from a bombed out stretch of highway, not just a zamboni-perfect airstrip. One russion pilot I saw interviewed was laughing about how fragile US planes are by comparison. If I remember correctly, he spoke from memory about an instance where the undercarriage on a plane failed to fully deploy and collapsed on landing. A US fighter would have disintegrated, but the Mig (or maybe it was an SU) just skidded, sparks flying, down the runway at 150mph for half a mile. Afterwards, they just picked it up, opened up the landing gear, and put it right back out on the flight pattern!
This is a roundabout way of saying that NASA would be very wise to build launch vehicles and spacecraft in the mold of Migs and Land Rovers instead of F-15s and Rolls Royces. Getting into space is expensive, so forget the penny pinching and do it right, or 1-in-50 of your shuttle launches are going to fail and half of your Mars probes are going to fail. Doing it right in this case means overbuilding everything, and that means building stuff heavy and building it to take a beating.
Spacecraft should look like the gear you find on an oil rig, not something built out of tissue paper in a clean room. And if your spacecraft is 5 times as heavy, and that costs money, so be it. It will work. It won't break. It's goddamn solar panels won't 'fail to deploy' because their little wrist-watch-sized motors freeze up, or whatever.
Well, that's my rant I guess. I just wish NASA would think of missions a little more like the army does. Think of the images from Iraq: you wouldn't send one virtually unique vehicle into hostile territory on a critical mission, and you wouldn't build a single gigantic thing to carry all your bear through the desert, because all your eggs would be in one basket. Instead, you have hundreds of trucks and they all roll out together. You plan on a few breaking down and being written off. You don't plan on bringing them back. You just do what it takes to get the job done, and an 'army' of simple, redundant, tough-as-nails trucks is what it takes...
Maybe it's just me, but I really appreciate shows like 24, where you actually have to follow a storyline over a significant period of time. For me that is the opposite of the stroboscopic dumbing down which characterizes most contemporary entertainment these days. For people like me who aren't exactly poster boys for the ritilin generation, it harkens back to an earlier era where TV and radio shows really had people talking about programs and really looking forward to the next episode. And is it that hard to do a quick, "previously on The Shadow..." at the beginning of each show?
I think the general viewership may be disappointed because of the similarities of A Wizard of Earthsea to Harry Potter, with the school of wizardry, the prodigal child, and so on. Of course it will be lost on these viewers that Le Guin's books date to the early 1960s...
No offense to the army of programmers reading slashdot, but how hard is it to get the software in these RC buggies to work properly? Obviously I'm aware that the environment is harsh on the hardware (then again, cold is good for computers, no?), but it just seems like NASA can't write code that isn't buggy for love or money - buckets and buckets of money.
Here's an idea: how about adapting the software that runs cars? That is surely tried and tested stuff, very robust, and almost never crashes. Those systems are of comparable complexity, and like the rovers they have very limited variable input (unlike a home computer).
Maybe instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on kleenex-frail gear and reinventing the wheel at every opportunity, how about spending all those millions on more fuel to send up heavier, more robust vehicles? Didn't that work for Apollo?
I mean, these vehicles that are supposed to run for months in a dust pit are built in a clean room for god's sake...
Bear in mind that there are vast differences between the different countries of the Gulf. The national identities of their societies go back millennia. I live in Oman, which a very progressive and pro-western country.
First to dispel some misconceptions: The women on the roads here think it is just as crazy that their counterparts in Saudi can't drive. Alcohol is available at hotels, restaurants, and in liquor stores. There is essentially no dress code for visitors, and we see plenty of tank tops and belly-button rings. Women don't wear veils or always black, because that's not part of Islam - that's a recent part of Saudi culture. Plenty of women wear jeans and t-shirts. Birth control pills are available at subsidized rates and are encouraged. And of course there are all of the modern ammenities you'd expect: water, power, cheap gas, shopping malls, movie theaters, Starbucks and McDonalds and satellite TV, just like everywhere else.
Second, there are a number of ways in which life here compares favorably to life back home (I'm American): in day to day living, things are less oppressive here. When you get pulled over by the cops, you get immediately get out of your car and shake hands with the cop and exchange pleasantries. You would get shot doing this where I lived in LA. Speaking of getting shot, there are no guns here. Well, there are rifles of course, but murder is exceedinly rare. In fact, the last one was some Texan woman who murdered her oil-worker husband with the aid of her son. There is virtually no crime to speak of at all. No metal detectors in schools, no looking over your shoulder in dark alleys, no worries or concerns about getting carjacked or mugged or harassed in any way. I rarely lock my car, never lock my house. Punishment for crimes is indeed swift, certain and severe, but a trial by jury is guaranteed - kind of like small-town USA. Medical care? Free. For everyone, foreign or Omani.
Freedom? There sure seems to be. All citizens vote for parliament members. There are female doctors, professors, ministers - you're free to choose to do whatever you want with your life. Freedom of religion too. A couple of my jewish friends have been out to visit and loved this place. You're much more free here to go where you like, camp where you like, eat and drink and smoke where you like. Cops in Arizona (well, rangers), in the middle of nowhere, busted me for trespassing and not camping at a designated campsite. And here I was used to rolling up any old place, pitching a tent, making a fire, cooking up some pork sausages I picked up from the local supermarket, surfing and fishing wherever I chose.
Next to my folks' house in California people had a 'vote no on prop 22' sign on their front lawn (the bill that would have allowed gay marriage, which was voted down). Racial hate crimes and general tension are vastly greater in the states than here - Oman is historically a melting pot because of all its sea-faring trade. Oh, and unlike in here, I needed a license to catch a fish and a permit for wherever I wanted to go fishing back in California.
The point of all this is that things are never black and white, and these countries out here are almost nothing like what the evening news and our elected officials would have us believe.
It's easy to rant against the ills of an entire society. America is a big target too, from the most deaths by guns, world's biggest gangs and sickest criminals (more serial killers than everyone else put together), largest corporate crimes, largest environmental crimes, state-sanctioned murder, blurring lines between church and state, right-wing fundamentalist nutcases, elections that make a mockery of democracy, KKK and entire regions thick with racist, ignorant scumbags - on and on and on.
The whole point of this article, which is seemingly lost on the above poster, is that in contrast to whatever vast societal differences may separate individuals, we can share many things in common - often on profoundly meaningful levels.
As an American aid worker living and working in the middle east, I can tell you point blank that the reason why there is conflict between our two societies is because there are assholes on both sides. The above post is demonstrative of that fact.
One way trips for explorers were quite common prior to the advent of global telecommunications. Even in the 20th Century look at people like Shackleton, let alone early explorers such as Magellan. But the Apollo program showed the world that, for national pride, "returning him safely to the Earth" was the true demonstration of technological superiority and power. There is something morally and philosophically compelling about not just making a perilous journey, but returning to tell the tale. Hence, we remember Columbus, Magellan and Shackleton more than those who walk off into the wild blue yonder never to return.
I for one would go one-way too, but it'd definitely be a far less epic accomplishment. I think we should wait until we can do it right. It just takes money. Fewer wars, more NASA - piece of cake.
My 12 megpixel Nikon digital takes clear, crisp photographs, but apart from clarity quality of the image - the color, depth, contrast, all that good stuff - is far, far behind even 35mm film. Photoshop helps of course, but still...
Discover Magazine ran an article in 2002 about recent advances in the chemistry of photographic foil. The archive is now pay-per-view (shame on them) so I can't find it, but the gist of the story was that film manufacturers could shortly begin implementing technology that would reduce the crystal size in the celluloid by a factor of 20. I believe that would be an increase in film's already very high resolution by a factor of 400. Perhaps digital will still have a way to go before catching up to film?
I've been following Moller for about 15 years. They do seem to have come a long way, but very slowly. I suspect the real problem is how insular the entire operation is. There's no doubt the guy is something of a genius, but he's obviously a paranoid control freak. This is a great example of how better management would lead to greater commercial success, and how technical know-how alone is not enough for a company to be successful. They could start by having a marketing and PR person write the company's marketing and PR copy instead of Moller himself, which would help get rid of the embarassingly bad content on their website. Also, any full-time lobbyist worth his or her salt could have gotten dumptrucks of money from the DOD for development of this, whereas Moller proudly (!) explains that the company has spent only $20m over 30 years developing this (probably more now, since they went public). Just plain dumb!
Two words: planned obsolescence. Carmakers build cars that are designed to be replaced, not cars that are designed to last forever. It's hard for moneymaking ploys to get any more transparent than this.
The notion of 10-12 hour work day seems to me almost impossible to believe. I suspect that comes from a western perspective of workload for laborers, but having lived overseas in developing countries I can assure you that on major, labor-intense construction projects _individual_ guys work 12-16 hour days, and sites operate all day and all night. I'm not an egyptologist, but I would guess they had the workers (slaves?) operating on a 16 hours on, 8 off schedule with 3 starting times for shifts.
Now I'm no physicist, and I don't know how potential energy is measured relative to a pair of celestial objects, but assuming the velocity of the spaceship relative to the target planet started at something FAR less than.3c, wouldn't that mean that the spaceship somehow had to acquire most of that 15 million megatons of energy itself? Where would that come from? From it's fuel, or fuel it gathered along the way (magentic fusion ramjet equivalent or something)?
Use the British version of Amazon for international orders. All products are available to ship to just about everywhere, and shipping time is much faster.
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I've seen other arguments about efficiency, scalability, cost effectiveness, and so on. While I'm ill-equipped to judge those, the numbers in those arguments at least make sense to me. The insufficient feedstock argument just doesn't seem to add up.
As for the feedstocks, this is from Discover Magazine's article about the technology: from 100lbs of
Plastic Bottles: 70 lbs oil, 16 lbs gas, 6 lbs carbon solids, 8 lbs water.
Municipal Liquid Waste (sewage): 26 lbs oil, 9 lbs gas, 8 lbs carbon and mineral solids, 57 lbs water
Tires: 44 lbs oil, 10 lbs gas, 42 lbs carbon and mineral solids, 4 lbs water
Heavy Oil (industrial oil waste): 74 lbs oil, 17 lbs gas, 9 lbs carbon solids
Medical Waste: 65 lbs oil, 10 lbs gas, 5 lbs carbon and mineral solids, 20 lbs water.
Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem like a 'relative lack of feedstocks' that 'only works for biological fats and some plastics.' Given the scale of garbage, sewage, and agricultural waste produced worldwide (think India and China, not just the USA), I suspect the statement that this 'will never be a large scale replacement for oil' is rash and unqualified.
With such technology in place, demonization of petroleum would then be less justified. The efficiency of hybrid vehicles would obviously still be relevent, but the issue would cease to be environmental and become purely economical.
With current technology it's hard to beat the convenience of liquid fuel. Hydrocarbdon recycling technology would not require such a dramatic change of infrastructure as electric or hydrogen power - that in itself would have enormous economic and associated environmental benefits. It would also present a parallel avenue of development for existing oil companies, creating incentive for them to actually support an environmentally friendly technology rather than to thwart it.
This is very relevent to those of us living in California, for example, where the government is spending billions in an initiative to roll out a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure. That is CRAZY in light of Thermal Conversion technology.
Is there some reason why we can't make these things tougher or more redundant?
In the short term, I suspect there would be more immediate applications for voice recognition than for visual object recognition, though I am still pulling for these guys if it leads to cars driving themselves.
Well done, by the way, for seeing through my hopelessly transparent plan to create an Orwellian world of thought control ... While I'm sure your intention was not to be funny, your reference to Thought Police made me laugh out loud. Who, I wonder, is the original Thought Policeman? It wouldn't happen to be God, would it? Perhaps you've never heard of the Spanish Inquisition, mmm? Or maybe the irony that a born-again president is the one who pushed the PATRIOT act through is lost on you? (You know, the one that tramples all of our privacy rights, rights to trial by jury, let's the government search our houses and record our conversations without ever even telling us, and so on...)
What morons like yourself fail to grasp is that religious dogma IS thought control, and God is the ultimate Big Brother. Only science has the self-critical, self-correcting mechanism required to allow truly free thought and inquiry. And "the truth will set you free," right? Or haven't you read John 8:32?
A central function of religion is indoctrination. The fact is, you and virtually all other religious people simply believe what you believe because you were brainwashed into it as a child. If you had never heard of religion prior to this morning, would you find Christianity compelling? More compelling than Bhuddism or Shintoism? More compelling than Scientology? Only one of them can be right, after all. So which one is it? Oh I see, it just magically happens to be the one you believe in. Why is that, I wonder?
And you presume to lecture me about Thought Police.
Ridiculous.
Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, drought, famine, small pox, polio, malaria, anthrax, ebola, bird flu, tuberculosis, plague, AIDS, nipples on men, pelvis in whales and snakes, wings on ostriches, alergies, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, leukemia, cancer, MS, Alzheimers, Down Syndrome, Turner Sydnrome, autism ... oh, and don't forget terrorism and myopia.
You call any of that crap 'Intelligent Design'? God can't figure out how to create a world without disaster or disease? That is the kind of 'intelligent' design you get from American car companies, not an omnipotent and omniscient being.
Ridiculous.
The real problem highlighted by the ID controversy is that the scientific community are cowards who are unwilling to asert and defend their true convictions about religion. The truth is that the vast majority of scientists think that, as all evidence points to, organized religion is a bunch of nonsense, God is unnecessary and unknowable and therefore irrelevent, Heaven and Hell are a child's fantasy, and believing in any of it is at best a waste of time and resources and (more often) the engine behind the most destructive force on our planet. But scientists are so fearful that most mutter some politically correct lip service whenever questioned or pressed on the issue.
Allowing religion to pursist in the face of humanity's accumulated scientific knowledge is profoundly irresponsible. The whole 'not in my back yard' attitude is astonishingly shortsighted. Religion and our lack of action to irradicate it is extremely dangerous and has deleterious consequences for everyone every single day - don't just think terrorists bombing things, think about actual adults trying to get evolution out of the classrooms - those classrooms are full of 15-year-olds having kids that end up on the street because they don't have knowledge of or access to contraceptives and abortion (ref. Ohio's Timken High School, for example, here _15_percent_ of the female student population is pregnant.) That problem, among many others, is not in your backyard - it is right in your face.
So I volunteer to be the dissenting voice in the crowd - here's my rhetorical rant on behalf of those scientists unable or unwilling to speak their minds, in case anyone is interested:
Religion serves only one purpose: to massage the fragile human ego.
The VAST majority of people who are religious simply believe in what they are born into, whether it is Christianity, Shintoism or Scientology. They believe in order to conform, in order to gain social acceptance, and in order to ease their fears of powerlessness and mortality so they can sleep comfortably at night thinking there is a special plan just for them and eternal life in paradise waiting for them when they die.
The truth about reality and the universe we live in is much more awesome, much more terrifying: we are no more significant than any other living thing on earth. Do you think bacteria go to heaven? You are simply a massive colony of symbiotic bacteria. So is your dog, the rat under the floorboards, and the cockroach out in the garbage.
Cheap parlor tricks like walking on water and burning bushes may seem like miracles to ignorant fools and to the people who lived centuries ago, but the real miracle is that we are alive at all, that in all the cosmos we are fortunate enough to exist in this tiny particular place at this particular time. The real miracle is the awesome power of evolution to explain virtually everything about life: how we descended not just from apes but from reptiles, fish, worms, and bacteria; why we have the physical form we have; why we think and feel and behave the way we do. The real miracle is that our universe is so old and so large that the ignorant peasants who wrote the Bible didn't have words for numbers big enough to describe the truth. The real miracle is that the universe IS knowable, and that miracle is called science. Science gave us dentistry a
I especially like this comment, "what the heck do you think you're doing, arguing for more redundancy in the same breath that you argue for accepting failures if it means making the mission cheaper?"
Last time I checked, the entire purpose of redundancy is to create fault tolerance, so that when you do have failures they are catastrophic ones. The idea being - putting your best thinking cap on here - that small failures are less expensive than catastrophic ones.
You know, that extremely advanced concept of how having 'all your eggs in one basket' can cost you dearly...
Tell you what, next time I head 600km into the Empty Quarter to a dig site you can tag along in a little hybrid SUV with cruise control and cup warmers. I'll go with my team in our four land rovers and pay a bit extra for gas. Take lots of extra water so you can survive long enough for us to pick you up on our way back, and be sure to burn your tires so we can find where you broke down.
In my view, NASA needs to stop thinking as though every mission, manned or not, is a camping trip where every ounce in your pack is critical. One reason why so many Mars probes have failed is because spacecraft are simply not at all robust. The best illustration I can think of for this mentality, and its counterpart, are US and soviet fighter planes.
Most of the US fighters we're familiar with - F-14s, 15s, 16s, 18s were designed with an extremely high maintenance profile in mind, and their designs assume base conditions that are close to sterile, just like NASA. So, for example, an American fighter can't take off of a runway that hasn't been swept! A stray nail on the runway, and your $20 million dollar plane is history. Obviously this assumes that you'll always be able to sweep your runways.
Now contrast that to Migs from the soviet era. With heavily overbuilt and ultra-durable systems - everything from airframe to electronics to engines - Migs can be maintained at a fraction of the cost, run on crappy fuel, and beaten to shit and back and still keep flying. In one Mig (can't remember which) the front air intakes close on takeoff and dorsal vents are used instead so that in real wartime conditions they could take off and land from a bombed out stretch of highway, not just a zamboni-perfect airstrip. One russion pilot I saw interviewed was laughing about how fragile US planes are by comparison. If I remember correctly, he spoke from memory about an instance where the undercarriage on a plane failed to fully deploy and collapsed on landing. A US fighter would have disintegrated, but the Mig (or maybe it was an SU) just skidded, sparks flying, down the runway at 150mph for half a mile. Afterwards, they just picked it up, opened up the landing gear, and put it right back out on the flight pattern!
This is a roundabout way of saying that NASA would be very wise to build launch vehicles and spacecraft in the mold of Migs and Land Rovers instead of F-15s and Rolls Royces. Getting into space is expensive, so forget the penny pinching and do it right, or 1-in-50 of your shuttle launches are going to fail and half of your Mars probes are going to fail. Doing it right in this case means overbuilding everything, and that means building stuff heavy and building it to take a beating.
Spacecraft should look like the gear you find on an oil rig, not something built out of tissue paper in a clean room. And if your spacecraft is 5 times as heavy, and that costs money, so be it. It will work. It won't break. It's goddamn solar panels won't 'fail to deploy' because their little wrist-watch-sized motors freeze up, or whatever.
Well, that's my rant I guess. I just wish NASA would think of missions a little more like the army does. Think of the images from Iraq: you wouldn't send one virtually unique vehicle into hostile territory on a critical mission, and you wouldn't build a single gigantic thing to carry all your bear through the desert, because all your eggs would be in one basket. Instead, you have hundreds of trucks and they all roll out together. You plan on a few breaking down and being written off. You don't plan on bringing them back. You just do what it takes to get the job done, and an 'army' of simple, redundant, tough-as-nails trucks is what it takes...
Maybe it's just me, but I really appreciate shows like 24, where you actually have to follow a storyline over a significant period of time. For me that is the opposite of the stroboscopic dumbing down which characterizes most contemporary entertainment these days. For people like me who aren't exactly poster boys for the ritilin generation, it harkens back to an earlier era where TV and radio shows really had people talking about programs and really looking forward to the next episode. And is it that hard to do a quick, "previously on The Shadow..." at the beginning of each show?
I think the general viewership may be disappointed because of the similarities of A Wizard of Earthsea to Harry Potter, with the school of wizardry, the prodigal child, and so on. Of course it will be lost on these viewers that Le Guin's books date to the early 1960s...
Here's an idea: how about adapting the software that runs cars? That is surely tried and tested stuff, very robust, and almost never crashes. Those systems are of comparable complexity, and like the rovers they have very limited variable input (unlike a home computer).
Maybe instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on kleenex-frail gear and reinventing the wheel at every opportunity, how about spending all those millions on more fuel to send up heavier, more robust vehicles? Didn't that work for Apollo?
I mean, these vehicles that are supposed to run for months in a dust pit are built in a clean room for god's sake...
First to dispel some misconceptions: The women on the roads here think it is just as crazy that their counterparts in Saudi can't drive. Alcohol is available at hotels, restaurants, and in liquor stores. There is essentially no dress code for visitors, and we see plenty of tank tops and belly-button rings. Women don't wear veils or always black, because that's not part of Islam - that's a recent part of Saudi culture. Plenty of women wear jeans and t-shirts. Birth control pills are available at subsidized rates and are encouraged. And of course there are all of the modern ammenities you'd expect: water, power, cheap gas, shopping malls, movie theaters, Starbucks and McDonalds and satellite TV, just like everywhere else.
Second, there are a number of ways in which life here compares favorably to life back home (I'm American): in day to day living, things are less oppressive here. When you get pulled over by the cops, you get immediately get out of your car and shake hands with the cop and exchange pleasantries. You would get shot doing this where I lived in LA. Speaking of getting shot, there are no guns here. Well, there are rifles of course, but murder is exceedinly rare. In fact, the last one was some Texan woman who murdered her oil-worker husband with the aid of her son. There is virtually no crime to speak of at all. No metal detectors in schools, no looking over your shoulder in dark alleys, no worries or concerns about getting carjacked or mugged or harassed in any way. I rarely lock my car, never lock my house. Punishment for crimes is indeed swift, certain and severe, but a trial by jury is guaranteed - kind of like small-town USA. Medical care? Free. For everyone, foreign or Omani.
Freedom? There sure seems to be. All citizens vote for parliament members. There are female doctors, professors, ministers - you're free to choose to do whatever you want with your life. Freedom of religion too. A couple of my jewish friends have been out to visit and loved this place. You're much more free here to go where you like, camp where you like, eat and drink and smoke where you like. Cops in Arizona (well, rangers), in the middle of nowhere, busted me for trespassing and not camping at a designated campsite. And here I was used to rolling up any old place, pitching a tent, making a fire, cooking up some pork sausages I picked up from the local supermarket, surfing and fishing wherever I chose.
Next to my folks' house in California people had a 'vote no on prop 22' sign on their front lawn (the bill that would have allowed gay marriage, which was voted down). Racial hate crimes and general tension are vastly greater in the states than here - Oman is historically a melting pot because of all its sea-faring trade. Oh, and unlike in here, I needed a license to catch a fish and a permit for wherever I wanted to go fishing back in California.
The point of all this is that things are never black and white, and these countries out here are almost nothing like what the evening news and our elected officials would have us believe.
The whole point of this article, which is seemingly lost on the above poster, is that in contrast to whatever vast societal differences may separate individuals, we can share many things in common - often on profoundly meaningful levels.
As an American aid worker living and working in the middle east, I can tell you point blank that the reason why there is conflict between our two societies is because there are assholes on both sides. The above post is demonstrative of that fact.
I for one would go one-way too, but it'd definitely be a far less epic accomplishment. I think we should wait until we can do it right. It just takes money. Fewer wars, more NASA - piece of cake.
My 12 megpixel Nikon digital takes clear, crisp photographs, but apart from clarity quality of the image - the color, depth, contrast, all that good stuff - is far, far behind even 35mm film. Photoshop helps of course, but still...
Discover Magazine ran an article in 2002 about recent advances in the chemistry of photographic foil. The archive is now pay-per-view (shame on them) so I can't find it, but the gist of the story was that film manufacturers could shortly begin implementing technology that would reduce the crystal size in the celluloid by a factor of 20. I believe that would be an increase in film's already very high resolution by a factor of 400. Perhaps digital will still have a way to go before catching up to film?
I've been following Moller for about 15 years. They do seem to have come a long way, but very slowly. I suspect the real problem is how insular the entire operation is. There's no doubt the guy is something of a genius, but he's obviously a paranoid control freak. This is a great example of how better management would lead to greater commercial success, and how technical know-how alone is not enough for a company to be successful. They could start by having a marketing and PR person write the company's marketing and PR copy instead of Moller himself, which would help get rid of the embarassingly bad content on their website. Also, any full-time lobbyist worth his or her salt could have gotten dumptrucks of money from the DOD for development of this, whereas Moller proudly (!) explains that the company has spent only $20m over 30 years developing this (probably more now, since they went public). Just plain dumb!
Now I'm no physicist, and I don't know how potential energy is measured relative to a pair of celestial objects, but assuming the velocity of the spaceship relative to the target planet started at something FAR less than .3c, wouldn't that mean that the spaceship somehow had to acquire most of that 15 million megatons of energy itself? Where would that come from? From it's fuel, or fuel it gathered along the way (magentic fusion ramjet equivalent or something)?
The Windows requirement will be handy when Gates runs for President.
Use the British version of Amazon for international orders. All products are available to ship to just about everywhere, and shipping time is much faster.